Maintenance tasks

[D00Med]

For anyone who would like to work on this mod, there are a number of changes which I think are a priority.
These are things I planned or was waiting for engine features in order to do.

• Split the drive function. One big function is not efficient. Better to have separate functions for flying, swimming, driving on land, etc. and maybe even for shooting, but call it inside each driving type. That way you'd only have to update the shooting function code once every time you wanted to make a change.
• Full rotation of flying vehicles. set_rotation(rot) should now make it possible to change the roll in addition to pitch and yaw. I don't know if the api allows for custom keyboard input but it'd be neat if you could use "a" and "d" for roll.
• Pitch rotation of ground vehicles based on y velocity or change in y position. I don't think I ever added this?

Feel free to comment with further tasks.

[D00Med]

#59 (comment)

Actually this mod requires a completely rewrite. All vehicles should be module-based, allow to enable or disable them one by one. Or you can even seperate them into another mod, just like what advtrains did.

A lot of code uses 0.4 old calls, changing is required in order to help us reduce the side of the log file.

Modules for every vehicle may be a bit inconvenient, but modules for vehicles types would certainly be a good idea.

[D00Med]

Regarding performance
When I first made this mod, I wanted it to be faster and less buggy than the other vehicle mods at the time, which were almost all based on a really old boat mod from "minetest game".
The simplest method for making a vehicle (at least in mt 0.4), is to attach the player to an entity (the vehicle), and move that vehicle in the direction of the player's look direction. Old versions of this mod were very fast.

Of course, over time more was added to the mod, and the performance advantage was lost.
If this mod was to be updated, it would be better to instead re-write the functionality from scratch, keeping the same features (or improving them), but use the same models.